Greetings to all from Boston on a sunny spring day. April marked another transition in the roster of ATJ officers: Naomi McGloin is now Past President, I am President, and Joan Ericson has been voted in as our new President–Elect. Let me express my thanks to all of you for the confidence you have shown in entrusting me with this office and to Naomi for her able leadership of ATJ during this past busy year. I look forward to working together with both Naomi and Joan over the coming year as we think about ways to respond more effectively as an organization to the needs of our membership in a changing national and global environment.

I would also like to welcome three new members of the ATJ Board--Kazumi Hatasa, Masumi Reade, and Paul Warnick--and to thank outgoing members Hiroko Furuyama, Keiko Schneider, and Yasuko Ito Watt for their service to the organization over the past three years.

I suspect that there are many in the Japanese language teaching community who, like me, keep one ear constantly attuned to world affairs to discern trends that may affect the future of our profession. Recent global trends are somewhat difficult to interpret in this regard. Although Japan appears to have decisively shaken itself free of the economic doldrums in which it was mired for most of the previous decade, it is China, not Japan, that is attracting greater attention as the emerging political and economic powerhouse in Asia these days. It is of course tempting to point out that while Japan has a population only one-tenth of China’s, its economy is over twice as large and Japan will for the foreseeable future provide more fertile career prospects for Westerners than China, but that argument seems to miss the point. The reality is that the global influence of Japan is largely measured these days not in “hard” economic terms but rather in terms of the "soft" power exerted by its visual media and popular culture across the globe.

As I consider the state of our profession in the midst of these trends, however, what I find most striking is how much less we have become dependent on external factors such as these, whether hard or soft, than we were in past decades. Despite some lingering exceptions (mostly on the East Coast), college-level students seem much less prone these days to choose (or not choose) Japanese as their foreign language based on what they happen to hear in the media during freshman orientation week and increasingly more based on some sort of prior exposure to Japanese language and culture in their pre-college years. This I take as a sign of the increasing maturation of our profession, and credit for this is largely due to a marked increase in the availability and quality of Japanese language training at the high school level. In speaking with colleagues around the country, it has become clear to me that high school Japanese language programs are playing an increasingly central role in supporting stable college-level Japanese enrollments, most notably in the Midwest and West Coast regions.

Building on this foundation and working toward a better integration of high school and college-level Japanese language education will form a central focus of our energies in ATJ over the coming months and years. Please stay tuned to this newsletter for developments at the high school level--such as the imminent completion of the Japanese Advanced Placement curriculum--that will certainly impact all of us in the Japanese language teaching field, no matter the level at which we teach.

Cooperation between high school and college-level Japanese teaching will also figure centrally in the International Conference on Japanese Language Education that ATJ is co-hosting with the National Council of Japanese Language Teachers at Columbia University on August 5th and 6th. This conference will be the first international event of its kind on Japanese language education held on American soil, and as you look at the program included in the center of this newsletter, I have no doubt you will share the sense of anticipation those of us on the planning committee feel as years of planning are about to come to fruition. I look forward to seeing you in New York for this historic event.